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I recently gave a presentation at the Digital Innovators Summit in Berlin on how FORBES is disrupting the traditional news media. There's nothing like preparing a PowerPoint deck to focus the mind, especially when one of the presenters (a former newsweekly colleague of mine) runs Sports Illustrated. Somehow you know he's going to show off a tablet app or something with swimsuit models (which he did).

My solution was to tell the FORBES story of the last 20 months -- the successes, challenges and learnings of a 95-year-old startup helping to lead journalism into the future. I've boiled it down to nine key points that capture what we've done to reinvent Forbes.com and put our authoritative journalism at the center of a unique social media experience.

1) The Individual as Brand: This trend actually began a century ago (William Randolph Hearst loved collecting celebrity journalists, including B.C. Forbes, our founder). In more modern times, national newspapers, broadcast television and cable turned many anchors (Walter Cronkite), reporters (Sam Donaldson) and columnists (Evans and Novak) into star brands. Each depended on a big media organization for distribution, marketing and so much more. The digital era and social media enable knowledgeable content creators to build audiences and followings on their own. Still, they need easy-to-use publishing tools; some technical prowess; training to market themselves across the social Web; and a way to monetize their content. FORBES provides all that for those who want their voices heard without the messiness of managing an infrastructure. Our full-time staffers now publish under their names, as do contributors, who remain independent operators. They all belong to a curated network of branded experts that naturally attracts other qualified writers who want to be part of a group that now totals 1,000.

2) A Data Culture: Our incentive-based contributor model has significantly changed the FORBES culture (just recently, we invited a small group to participate in our morning newsroom meeting). But the introduction of data to what I call our New Newsroom has had the most dramatic impact. In August 2010, we introduced Web screens with a public page-view counter (it's just under my photo at the top of this page, right next to the time stamp). Suddenly, everyone could see how many times a story had been viewed -- the audience, all our authors, their colleagues and their friends. At first, staffers and contributors were uncomfortable. It was upsetting for them to see when their posts didn't attract attention. Many lobbied for the counters to be removed. I've felt for quite awhile that real-time feedback would help journalists better serve their readers. "The data is to inform your journalism, not to rule it," I would say. As our contributor base and audience grew, we started to encounter technical glitches with the counter. Then something fascinating began to occur: when the counter wasn't working, publishing slowed to a trickle. The data feedback loop had become that important to our content creators. That spurred an ambitious effort by our Technology Development team to build a better data collection system. Today, the counter is working beautifully. Our staffers and contributors are building even bigger audiences. We continue to improve and add data to their individualized real-time data dashboards. And last week, our TechDev team released a site-wide data dashboard that our newsroom can use to help our writers be even more productive and successful.

3) Creative Control: I often say, "The tools will set you free." Far too often it's just too hard too publish. We've solved many common issues by building our content-creation system on WordPress, then customizing its scalability so our staffers and contributors can all be we writers, photo editors, video editors and community managers. That makes them producers and programmers of every post and every page that represents their individual brand. We've named the tool that brings it all together the Vest Pocket. FORBES is a curated network. We have a full-time staff and a pool of contributors we vet the same way we select employees. With the Vest Pocket, our content creators can curate the related content on their pages, too. They can choose to promote their own related posts, galleries or videos (as I did to the left) -- or those from other staffers or contributors. They can also select from thousands of our People, Places and Company pages. And they can do all that in a few minutes with an easy search tool. Bottom line: the Vest Pocket gives all our content creators the creative control of their work that many other news organizations hand over to a bureaucratic system of editors or algorithms.

4) The Social Layer: Since launching our staff and contributor publishing model, our strategy has been to put our authoritative journalism at the center of a social media experience. On nearly every news site, the most effective way for the audience to engage is to comment -- and comments are typically found at the bottom of Web pages. At first, our moderated commenting system (staffers and contributors "Call Out" user remarks that move a conversation forward) reduced the noise level. Now, we're able to elevate rewarding commentary to the very top of the page, just beneath the headline. The Comment Strip (see below) begins to appear as soon as audience commentary is Called Out by either a content contributor or one of our newsroom producers. When you roll over an individual's avatar, the comment appears (clicking it will take you to the comment field lower on the page) It's important to mention right here that we curate, or filter, audience comments on Forbes.com. We don't censor reader thoughts. There's a button labeled "All Comments" in the comment field at the bottom of every page. By clicking that button, the news consumer can see the entire comment thread as it developed. The result: the content creator's brand, an authoritative headline and community engagement is now at the highest level of every post. We'll soon introduce the FORBES Follow Bar, a similar layer for staffers and contributors. It will contain the images and headlines of Forbes.com writers a user chooses to follow (we'll recommend some, too), or writers contextually related to the content being viewed.

5) Transparency and Openness: This is at the heart of everything we do. Our audience knows if a writer is a staff member, a contributor or an AdVoice partner (see below). An author bio is prominently displayed in the right rail of every post. I'm a stickler about bios. They must identify the person and the individual brand and lay out the writer's credentials so a reader knows where the author is coming from. A bio must offer the reader a reason to believe the author is credible. A little personality helps, too. Many bios accomplish all this. Many don't. As anyone on the staff can tell you, it's not uncommon for me to email, call or even visit an editor to urge that a bio be improved. Openness also means opening our site to the larger world. We're turning into a publishing platform for journalists, authors, academics, topic experts, business leaders and content partners. They all use our tools to reach an audience. We're also evolving into a social operating system for business news enthusiasts. To make it easier for people to sign up to comment (they'll have other privileges in the future), we recently enabled users to register on Forbes.com by using ID's from their social accounts, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google +. They can also create a FORBES account, link a previous FORBES account with one of the social sites, or sign up with credentials from Yahoo, AOL and many other sites. In the month since we launched this feature (it's available under the search box at the top of this page or within a post's comment field), registrations and comments have doubled. That's visually evident by all the social avatars now appearing in the Comment Strip.

6) Rethinking Models: The content business has been deeply impacted by digital publishing, the rise of social media and dramatic changes in advertising pricing models (the push for audience buying has put continuous downward pressure on CPMs). The economics of traditional news providers are broken, and the journalistic labor model of the last 100 years is losing its relevance. That's why we're building a new content creation model based on individual brands under the FORBES umbrella; The New Newsroom; an incentive-based compensation plan for contributors that we've also been testing with staffers; and efficient publishing tools that also help us distribute our content in new ways.

7) The Journalism: In a word, it's about authenticity. Today's audiences look for great reporting, context, perspective, analysis -- and importantly, a certain level of personal engagement with the story itself and the community consuming it. Short-form and long-form content work equally well -- and so does everything in between. The job of FORBES staff reporters is to make phone calls to sources, to bring their years of topic knowledge to their readers, and to transact with them one-on-one. The job of contributors is to bring understanding from their life-long passions and careers to readers hungry for depth of experience and knowledge. Last week, staff reporters Susan Adams and Steve Schaefer did that here and here. Over the last few weeks, contributors Paul Tassi and Erik Kain earned the respect of gamers with their coverage of the drama surrounding Mass Effect 3. Check out Paul's video post (done with his iPhone), which is the beginning of our effort to scale a group of video contributors.

8) The Power of Partners: As an entrepreneur, I learned the value of building on the backs of giants -- particularly WordPress. At FORBES, we're doing the same -- and working with startups, too. WordPress is a big piece of content management system. We launched tablet apps on Google Currents. We signed a content deal with YouTube and will soon be using its player on Forbes.com. In a collaboration with Facebook developers, we introduced the Facebook Subscribe button. We're always on the lookout for newsroom data tools -- and that led us to Betaworks, Social Flow and Visual Revenue. One of our content partners is Narrative Science, which provides computer-generated company earnings previews. A tool from Zemanta enables our staffers and contributors to find and use creative commons photography and another tool from DayLife makes it easy for them to build photo galleries. We're now talking with startups about polls and other functionality.

9) Content is Content: For us, it's The Content Continuum. Journalists, authors, academics, the audience and marketers all have a place. FORBES is disrupting traditional advertising by enabling marketers to publish content on Forbes.com with the same tools that I or any of our staffers and contributors use. It's called AdVoice. In the spirit of transparency, each marketer is clearly identified and labeled. Marketing content is also dynamically and contextually distributed across our site (again, always labeled). On numerous occasions, marketer content has appeared in the Most Popular module (in fact, I can remember a few instances when marketers had the most popular posts on our site). Today's audiences have made it very clear: they want great content from the most knowledgeable sources. They just wanted it clearly labeled with the opportunity to respond and initiate a dialogue.

That's a lot of change on the way to 30 million monthly unique visitors -- all made possible by the FORBES mission, which remains unchanged. We're about success, free enterprise, entrepreneurial capitalism, smart investing and the doers changing the world. That was the prism for nearly 100,000 posts last year. In all this, our magazine, with its new people-focused cover strategy, is one of the great brand doors to the world. With 22 issues a year, it gives us the discipline to take a longer-term view of content. When published on Forbes.com, our deeply reported print stories frequently feel less ephemeral, capturing significant audience attention and engagement.

There you have it. A long deck reduced to nine points of dramatic change in less than two years -- with more on the way. We’re striving to create a news experience that is not just social, but connected. That means we’ll continue to build on and extend the relationships between news consumers and our staff writers, contributors and marketers. Over the next three months, we'll launch a series of products that will take us further along this path -- on desktop, smartphone and tablet. We look forward to seeing your thoughts in the Comment Strip -- right up there at the top of the page.

Note: Bikinis and Billionaires. Terry McDonell, the SI sports group editor, has his big annual issue, and we have ours.